Politics
jstemwedel | September 12, 2007Perhaps you've already seen the new(ish) AAUP report Freedom in the Classroom, or Michael Bérubé's commentary on it at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. The report is such a clear statement of what a professor's freedom in the classroom amounts to and, more importantly, why that freedom is essential if we are to accomplish the task of educating college students, that everyone who cares at all about higher education ought to read it.
Some of the highlights, with my commentary:
On concerns that professors "indoctrinate" rather than educate:
It is not indoctrination for professors to expect…
j7uy5 | September 11, 2007I don't think this has ever happened before. I was
reading an
article about the organizational chart at the
href="http://www.fda.gov/" rel="tag">FDA
and I laughed out
loud.
Unfortunately it was not a good "monkey-on-a-goat" LOL moment; rather,
it was a "WTF-sounds-like-Bush" kind of LOL.
The chart is from this article:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/10/960">Sidelining
Safety — The FDA's Inadequate Response to the IOM,
by Sheila Weiss Smith, Ph.D, in the latest NEJM (Volume 357:960-963).
(It's open-access.)
I've written about this at length before (
href…
pharyngula | September 11, 2007The appropriate testimonial would be to disband the thugs at TSA.
While we're at it, impeaching Bush/Cheney and repealing their damage to our civil liberties would also be a good start.
I'm not impressed with moments of silence or candlelight vigils or noble rhetoric about this event. If you want to do something to remember that tragedy, the best thing to do is to simply stop living your life in fear.
oracknows | September 10, 2007
Today is the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A couple of years ago, I wrote an extended take on the attacks and what I thought about them. I encourage you to read it, either for the first time or again. Two years later, I don't have much to add other than to note that I've seen several stories in the press expressing concern that Americans are forgetting the the attacks or not paying sufficient reverence to the fallen anymore.
This story, for example, appeared in a New Jersey newspaper over the weekend:
In Westfield, weeds have taken over the brick walkways around the 9/11 memorial…
voltagegate | September 10, 2007Bill Moyers wrote a piece about surface mining the other day, talking about a recent change to the policy in 2006:
The proposed new rule codifies the 2004 buffer zone proposals and, according to THE NEW YORK TIMES, "seems specifically to authorize the disposal of 'excess spoil fills,' a k a mine waste, in hollows and streams."
THE NEW YORK TIMES in reporting the proposed changes stated: "The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be…
jlynch | September 9, 2007Did Klaus-Martin Schulte plagiarize his response to Naomi Oreskes from Christopher Monckton? Looks like it. You be the judge.
Is Monckton hanging around the comments of this blog, trying to scare people. Looks like it. You be the judge.
neurophilosophy | September 8, 2007ABC News has posted a transcript of Osama bin Laden's videotaped statement, in which he refers to Noam Chomsky as "among the most capable" of commentators on the Iraq war.
And in a Mind Hacks exclusive, Vaughan has posted a deleted portion of the statement, in which bin Laden lays out his demands for psycholinguists.
pharyngula | September 7, 2007Daniel Cooper knows how to properly evaluate what's important. He's George W. Bush's undersecretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs. We're in the middle of a bloody, wasteful war, and we've got lots of veterans who deserve support and, you know, benefits, so I think Mr Cooper's job is fairly important.
What does Mr Cooper think is important? He's made a video for Campus Crusade for Christ in which he plainly spells out where his priorities lie.
In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, "it's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is…
j7uy5 | September 7, 2007Mitt Romney's national finance committee (ex-) co-chairman,
title="Forbes article"
href="http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/09/ap4006058.html"
rel="tag">Alan Fabian,
is in trouble. He's been indicted for mail fraud, money
laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.
Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty. The story
here, as
href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200709010002?f=h_latest">Media
Matters points out,
is that the problems with a donor to the Hillary Clinton campaign have
been aired repeatedly on all the major networks. The problems…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2007Bill Maher turned up on Hardball the other night. As usual, he had some insightful things to say.
Here's the first item I especially liked. Matthews' question was about the surge in Iraq:
MAHER: Well, you know, when you have to make a secret trip to Iraq, I think probably your surge plan isn't really working. Is it working in the sense that we can stop violence in different pockets because we have a kick-ass army? Yes. Yes, they can do that. But this has always been about forming a government in Iraq and having an Iraqi army that could back up the will of that government. And that's…
lundblad | September 7, 2007Ah, what loyal citizen of California doesn't remember singing the state song, I Love You, California, every morning. Or was it saying the Pledge...my memory's hazy.
The reason I bring up state songs is not to bring up the ill-fated campaign to make "Born to Run" the New Jersey state song (this town rips the bones from your back; it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap; we've gotta get out while we're young.) but rather to point out that the state I currently work in (but do reside in; I'm taxed but not represented, myself) has its own state song, Maryland, My Maryland! Astounding, jaw-…
j7uy5 | September 7, 2007This morning the US government revealed that employment is
down by 4,000 jobs. The market took a dive. Why was
the impact so bad?
It is one of two reasons. Either the numbers are so bad, that
the government can't lie about them, or the numbers
are so bad, that the government isn't even going to bother
lying about them.
pharyngula | September 7, 2007Friends for a Non-Violent World (FNVW)
Presents:
Leaving Iraq Now
Why it's the best chance for peace & security and why September is our best
chance to make it happen.
Phil Steger was born in Buffalo, NY and raised
in Marshall, MN. He earned a B.A. in Theology
from St. John's University. Until recently, he was
executive director of the Quaker organization,
Friends for a Non-Violent World. He traveled
three times to Iraq on peacemaking delegations
before the present war and appeared widely as a
commentator on the war on network TV, MPR, AM
talk radio, and both the Minneapolis Star…
pharyngula | September 7, 2007Our president has been away in Australia. Who knew? Who cares? I only care because Australia has some of the most venomous wildlife around, and because anything that sends the asshole-in-chief to the other side of the planet is a good thing.
Anyway, the Australians waste $A165 million on security, rather than giving Bush a few hundred dollars and telling him to go play with the stingrays up around the Great Barrier Reef, and look what happens: a comedy troupe gussies up a few cars to look officially Canadian, and drove an Osama bin Laden imitator right up to the president's hotel. They…
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2007
COSMOS magazine has an interesting article sure to stir up trouble by suggesting that, among other things, global organic farming would necessitate clearing all remaining forests and even then a substantial portion of the earth's population would starve.
I don't know enough about this topic to speak sensibly, but I will anyway. What with the current, and it now looks like permanent, drought in Australia, the carrying capacity of the land, not only in Australia, is stressed to the max. Fisheries are declining. Amazonian and Malaysian forests are being cleared. Biodiversity is dropping…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2007
"It is incredible what people say under the compulsion of torture, and how many lies they will tell about themselves and about others; in the end whatever the torturers want to be true is true."
Friedrich Spee von Lagenfeld, S.J., 1633
pharyngula | September 5, 2007You've got to read this account of the intelligence that led to the Iraq war.
On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Now two former senior CIA officers have…
neurophilosophy | September 4, 2007The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the governmental body that regulates fertility treatments in the U.K., looks set to approve the use of hybrid embryos for stem cell research at a meeting later on today.
Earlier this week, the HFEA published its public consultation on the subject. This revealed that, although many people found the idea of human-animal hybrid embryos to be repugnant, most approved of it when they better understood the reasons for it.
Researchers can create hybrid embryos by the transferring nuclei from human cells into animal egg cells from which…
denialism | September 4, 2007Here's an excellent opportunity to use the hive mind to look for classic techniques of deception for political benefit on the question of the "surge".
Reading the news stories about the progress in Iraq, I can't help but notice a certain partisan nature to interpretation of events. You have the conservative Washington Times saying The Surge is Working, meanwhile, the liberal Washington Post (although as supporters of the Iraq war I feel this designation is non-descriptive for WaPo) indicates the results are at best mixed. We have a GAO report indicating poor performance with only a bare…